⚙️ Work
- The Learning Technologies Advisory Committee reboot was, I think, successful. Members will be going back to their faculties/units over the summer to find out how student respond systems are used, then reporting back at the first meeting of LTAC in the fall.
- The Brightspace Steering Committee was pretty clear - there is no appetite to license additional stuff, given budgets and increasing licensing fees for the core package. We won’t be going back to the Provost to ask for more. So, looking to ensure we’re getting maximum value out of what we have available in the core package.
🔗 Links
Braaaaaaainnnssss…
Robert Epstein @ Aeon: The empty brain: Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer. (via Emily Gorcenski)
The human brain is not a computer. The “Information Processing (IP) Metaphor” is not valid.
Because neither ‘memory banks’ nor ‘representations’ of stimuli exist in the brain, and because all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience. If you and I attend the same concert, the changes that occur in my brain when I listen to Beethoven’s 5th will almost certainly be completely different from the changes that occur in your brain. Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.
But we can surely scan a brain and digitize it and turn it into an AI or something, right?
Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.
Nope. And that means that it’s also impossible for software - including AI - to truly replicate how a human brain works. The IP Metaphor is not compatible with how our brains and consciousness actually work.
Francine Russo @ Scientific American: Up All Night? You May Have Actually Been Asleep - this explains so much. (via Jason Kottke)
AI
- Jenny Robert & Mark McCormack @ EDUCAUSE Research: 2024 EDUCAUSE Action Plan: AI Policies and Guidelines - looking at data from their 2024 AI Landscape Study, and providing a framework to support the development of institutional AI policies and guidelines.
Existential Crises
- Rivka Galchen @ The New Yorker: Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It (proxy link through the paywall)- (via Grant Potter)
“It’s the opposite of nihilism,” he said. “Because we’re not special, the onus is on us to make a difference.”
Dementia
- Aryn Toombs @ Livewire Calgary: First-of-its-kind park focused on individuals with dementia being built in Calgary. This would have been game-changing for dad. Instead, he got stuck in a shared room in a long-term-care facility, with a belligerent roommate and caregivers that didn’t seem to understand how best to support his dementia and aphasia. Eventually, he got moved into the same facility as mom and they shared a room, but caregivers still didn’t know how to support him so he spent the last years of his life frustrated and scared and locked inside his own head.
Silence (and the lack thereof)
Diego Ramírez Martín del Campo @ Aeon: Eulogy for silence
Despite all that tinnitus has taught me, I would get rid of it completely if only there was a way. I have learned to accept it, because it was my only option. But now, when I seek silence, I know to look for it not in complete quiet but in the rain and in other soundscapes that offer a break from our own din.
I haven’t experienced silence in years. Always, the background eeeeeeeee, sometimes foregrounded, sometimes seeming so loud that it’s overwhelming.
I had lost something deeply personal in my loss of silence, and it wasn’t too dramatic to think of the tinnitus as a kind of screaming inside my head. This terrible screaming that only I could hear was my silence finding its voice.
🍿 Watching
- ★★★★☆ Trying (Apple TV+) - this season is good, after a bit of a time jump. Just a good show, without post-apocalypses or superheroes or ends-of-the-worlds.
🧺 Other
The Boy™ graduated from his program at SAIT. The convocation ceremony was nice - and different from a UCalgary ceremony in many ways. It was amazing watching him cross the stage, and it felt more emotional than any of the 4 convocations I made family members sit through…
Health stuff. More follow-up referrals being set up after the CT. Awesome.
Calgary’s infrastructure is crumbling. We have lots of funds for things like billion-dollar-arenas (ugh) and new train lines (yay), but we’ve had zero appetite for large-scale maintenance projects. Until they fall apart. Which just happened. A city of 1.6 million, without reliable access to drinking water for almost 2 months because a critical piece of 50-year-old infrastructure went kablooey. This is just the most public example. Last summer, the main pipe that fed UCalgary had a similar (although less catastrophic) leak, and we had to restrict water usage on campus until it was fixed.
I needed to find a text file that contained a specific string, and spotlight wasn’t finding it for some reason. No worries - a quick search for ideas for the best way to approach it using command line tools, and I found a way to use the built-in grep utility. I’d only ever used grep to receive piped output from something else, but running it on its own works great!
grep "string you're looking for" . -RThis looks at the current directory . and then looks at any directories within that, recursively. It outputs the path to any files that contain the string, and highlights where it matched. Handy! I’ve been using flavours of UNIX-like systems since 1987 and hadn’t realized grep could be used this way.
More futzing around with the design of this website. I decided to just fork the BeautifulHugo theme so I could make deeper changes without worrying about overwriting them if I update from the source theme later. It now properly honours dark/light mode as set in your device. Some last fiddly bits of colours that I still want to fix, but it’s pretty much there.
🗓️ Focus for next week
- Meetings - Finance, tech, vendor, programming, LTDT team, TI staff.